Nervous About Wildfires? Sisters Therapist Offers Tips for Staying Calm: Carry on

It may seem counterintuitive, but local therapist Dasha Gousseva says the best way to manage stress levels heightened by Central Oregon’s wildfires is to focus on the things we can control. Fair-weather activities that ground us, such as socializing in person or devoting a few hours to hobbies, can help tamp down the adrenaline and cortisol flooding our body’s systems.

To be sure, this prescription is much less intended for Central Oregonians who are in evacuation levels 2 or 3 than those presently in level 1 — or just somewhere smoky. But once all the emergency bags are packed and the go-now plans are in place, what’s the best way to recover from fight or flight mode?

Gousseva, a somatic and trauma therapist, practices through Aspen Counseling in Sisters. She’s going through the same stress as the other residents in proximity to the Akawa Butte Fire, which as of Friday has burned 27,000 acres within miles of Sisters and is 43% contained. She shares tips on regulating our “lizard brain” response when it goes haywire.

[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.]

the Source: How’s it going in Sisters?

Dasha Gousseva: We’ve had really clean air the past two days. It feels extra gratifying to get to be outside, marvel at how nice it is after all the smokiness.

tS: How have your patients been responding to the Akawa Butte Fire?

DG: As a trauma therapist, I’m typically helping patients through their own isolated incidents. But in the case of the Akawa Butte Fire, well, it’s happening to me, too. What a unique experience. I was noticing that even if folks weren’t necessarily bringing up the wildfire in their sessions, they were in a more hyper-alert state. A lot of people referenced how the smoke makes them feel groggy and have headaches and fatigue. But it also makes their level of safety feel very different — they’re in survival mode. So in my sessions last week, I ended up being a direct support to clients, being a resource. I also conveyed that there’s a difference between having these danger cues within our environment and truly being in danger. Yes, fire smoke can signal danger, but it can also be that the smoke is blowing from several miles away. You might feel that you need to be really alert right now, that you need to check Watch Duty and social media all the time, seeing what your neighbors are posting, but maybe not every moment. At a certain point, [getting] overwhelmed is not helpful.

tS: Gotcha. Central Oregon has seen so many wildfires in recent months and years. Can a prolonged stress response develop? Can trauma from one fire bleed into the next?

DG: Absolutely, but I don’t necessarily perceive things from the word “trauma,” but moreso the impacts that things have on our nervous systems, our neurological wiring, our way of relating to what’s around us. I Just love nervous system science. Something that’s interesting, when we talk about the nervous system, we’re talking about the lower regions of our brain and spinal cord, and all the enervations to and from our body within that.

tS: This is our “lizard brain.”

DG: Yes, our lizard brain, our primordial brain stem region. Boiled down, we’re not necessarily within our cognition. We’re not understanding that [a stressful event] has this date and time stamp, I went through it, and now I’m fine. I think it’s unique in Central Oregon, because this isn’t a one-time fire. We’re experiencing this year after year, and it’s like we’re primed to respond this way — a large population gets its vigilance turned on during these months.

tS: During stressors like these, how do we chill out? Should we self-isolate? What types of social connections should people seek out?

DG: People tend to isolate, maybe not even intentionally, just like, “I’m stressed out. I need to go through these evacuation checklists. Let me check the notifications. And work has me more overwhelmed — I don’t have time for socialization.” Whatever it might be. At the same time, I hope people can lean into their communities, friends, neighbors, without necessarily talking about the wildfires constantly. Hopefully, they can have more light, fun forms of connection where there’s an extension of support, some sort of reassurance. Also, calling a friend who’s calm and level-headed, one who doesn’t live here, is a good idea. It’s less about being distracted than not seeing everything through the lens of wildfire smoke and communities that are at risk.

Hot, dry, windy conditions fueled the Akawa Butte fire on July 25, allowing a large unburned interior pocket within containment lines to slowly burn through ponderosa pine and manzanita along Little Akawa Butte. Credit: InciWeb

Also, anything you can do to reduce your perception of threat is great. For example, have an air filter at your house. If you’re out driving and it’s grainy and groggy, your lungs feel worse, you now that when you get home, you’ll have clean air. Then, of course, there’s this knowledge that we’re at our best not only when we’re connected, but when we’re enjoying ourselves. I think that’s something that the mental health nervous system regulation field misses out on. It’s not necessarily about taking a sequence of deep breaths, even though that can be helpful. It’s about reaching this state within your body and mind where you’re like, “Ok, things are getting better now.” That could be doing something you love, like a hobby, that you haven’t done in a while and now you get to. It could be a nice meal. Have that pleasant experience with it. There’s another somatic therapy provider in Washington who lived in a community that experienced fires back-to-back, really close to home. His main message was: Get out there, be around people, have fun. That can sound really simplified, but we’re also wired for simplicity, right? Take us back 1,000 years ago, we didn’t have all these astute strategies for regulating our nervous system, such as breath work, cold plunges or vagus nerve stimulator devices. We had much simpler strategies, and, in a lot of cases, they worked. There’s a reason we have them biologically.

tS: What else should folks know?

DG: Something that’s been on my mind this week is the question of who gets affected by wildfires and in what capacity. Something that I talk about in my work within therapy and nervous system studies is that some people go through challenging experiences and they’re on a figurative yacht. They have these resources. Others go through challenges in a paper rowboat. It’s completely different. In an idyllic world, we have this one threat — we do our best around it and we come out with more resilience. If you’re not of means, if you’re in the paper rowboat, before you deal with the wildfire stress, you have to deal with all the nuts-and-bolts stuff, like: Where am I sleeping? What am I eating? Is my family OK? Do I have a way to leave? These are genuine survival questions. The stress is so acute that I can’t even get to a place supporting my well-being through this. Some of my patients get to leave, others have to stay in Sisters, even though the fire is 3, 4 miles away. How scary is that? I think that’s a large part of the population that gets left out of the conversation.